Dope

I was thinking of writing about gout today... because I have surely written enough about the bombing. I was talking with some friends a couple of days ago about gout, and one of them said, well, what is gout? And I thought, what a perfect topic...

Well, who am I fooling? We live in a time when the margins will not hold, and are drawn magnetically to the center, to the images, topics, imbecilities, commonplaces, pans, and cant of the Network news.

So okay. Last week, when the WTC slaughter was 8 hours old, I was watching the shot of the towers fall, in rotation, on the tv, over at Don and Senem's house. Senem is from Istanbul, and she said something I thought perspicacious - she said, the Turk in me says, blood for blood. The Turk in me utters the same cry. But certainly that shouldn't be the last word on the subject. Since last Tuesday, I've seen Senem a few times, and each time, after I've said various things that aren't in the American pep rally spirit, she has implied that I am an anti-American snot, at least compared with the people she works with, who are practically coming out rashes of Stars and Bars, I mean it is almost medical. It is certainly pathological.

I've tried to explain that, far from being anti-American, I'm very consciously in the American tradition of bitching, cussedness, black humor, anti-establishmentarianism, and pissing on public monuments -- all marks of our great inebriated whoremongering pioneer ancestors as they settled ever westward, and gave up the expensive and useless pretences of the Old World for rustling, drinking, and saying "like" in, like, every context.

Well, this is one of those periods when we have to cherish the ragged 10 percent -- the ones who don't give high marks to the Prez in the polls, the ones who ask, plaintively why do they hate us (yes, that's a little irritating -- I'm going to do a post on that inanity) instead of why can't we kill em all now and let God sort em out afterwards; the ones who gather, in small groups, before state capitals and in parks to sing John Lennon songs of peace and chant the people//united//will never be defeated -- or whatever. This is our inner brake, our fabled, fabulous diversity in action, and tough titty if you think these are anti-Americans -- they have a hot cousinship to your blood and bearings, mon frere, so quit with the McCarthyite blather.

At times like this, the liberal thing to do is to go popular front, and talk about how us embattled lefties are part of a grand tradition stretching back to Tom Paine. That's true. But, like Tom Paine, I see no need for that, uh, defensiveness. We have an intellectual model in Randolph Bourne, the little crooked pamphleteer who wrote against the American entry into World War I. His The War and the Intellectuals is a classic statement of dissent and a public pissing on public monuments with style and joie de vivre. Here's a link to that essay. And here's a random, beautiful passage from it:

"The American intellectual, therefore has been rational neither in his hindsight, nor his foresight. To explain him we must look beneath the intellectual reasons to the emotional disposition. It is not so much what they thought as how they felt that explains our intellectual class. Allowing for colonial sympathy, there was still the personal shock in a world-war which outraged all our preconceived notions of the way the world was tending. It reduced to rubbish most of the humanitarian internationalism and democratic nationalism which had been the emotional thread of our intellectuals' life. We had suddenly to make a new orientation. There were mental conflicts. Our latent colonialism strove with our longing for American unity. Our desire for peace strove with our desire for national responsibility in the world. That first lofty and remote and not altogether unsound feeling of our spiritual isolation from the conflict could not last. There was the itch to be in the great experience which the rest of the world was having. Numbers of intelligent people who had never been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic peace at home were shaken out of their slumber by the horrors of war in Belgium. Never having felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home, they had a large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt only the ugly contempt for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with the struggle for freedom abroad. "